More on the thermodynamics of weight loss
Okay. I said I was through with Anthony Colpo, but now I’m going to quote from him once again. What gives?
What gives is that I’m stuck in the airport in Seattle – my flight to Chicago is delayed for almost four hours because of bad weather in the Windy City. I figured I would use this time to stick up a quick post about thermodynamics and provide a long quote from Robert McLeod, who writes Entropy Production, a physics (sort of) blog. As you can see below, he pretty much trashes Bray and other nutritional researchers who blithely use the 1st Law of Thermodynamics to prove the old a-calorie-is-a-calorie notion. To show the way the average nutritional writer looks at this law, I needed to find a quote. As it works out, the only thing I have with me is Anthony’s book The Fat Loss Bible, which just happens to have the perfect quote. So, sorry AC, I’m not really trying to pick on you. And you certainly aren’t the only nutritional writer who thinks this way – you’re just the only one who has a quote handy I can use.
The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be converted from one form to another. In other words, energy just doesn’t just magically disappear; it must be converted to something else. In the case of any excess calories you ingest, they will be stored as fat, used to accommodate an increase in lean tissue mass, or dissipated as heat through thermogenesis. Manipulating the proportion of protein, fat and carbohydrate you eat each day will not excuse you from the Law of Thermodynamics.
This is the way just about all nutritional scientists and writers look at the First Law. Let’s take a look at how a physicist sees it. Robert McLeod wrote a long post a while back reviewing Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories. Near the end of the post, he discusses the energy balance equation and one of our old friends, Dr. George Bray, who gave Gary’s book a bad review in an obesity journal. (I posted on this same review a couple of times here and here.)
On to the second and, mercifully, final part of the critical review of the metabolic advantage as presented by A Colpo in his book The Fat-Loss Bible. As discussed in
There are a lot of disagreeable jobs out there. Dealing with Anthony Colpo is one of them. Trying to make sense of thermodynamics is another. Whereas dealing with AC is kind of like the job pictured at the left – distasteful but fairly simple – delving into the workings of the laws of thermodynamics is intellectually challenging but far from easy. Problem is, it appears kind of easy, and everyone, it seems, fancies himself to be an expert. (How many people have we heard blather on about how a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, thinking they are accurately stating the 1st law of thermodynamics?) But the truth is that the more you study thermodynamics and the more you seem to learn, the less you really understand.
I’m taking a short break from the great Anthony Colpo smackdown to report on all the goings on with the ‘wretched’ choral society and the Beatles concert. As I’ve mentioned before, MD has been pushing for a Beatles concert since she’s been the president (her three-year term will be mercifully over on June 30, and I’ll have my wife back). It’s all come to pass with a whole lot of help from a whole bunch of people. And, thanks to all this effort by all these people – especially Brooks Firestone – it has turned into a much, much huger event than she had ever imagined.








